Johnson visited Germany in the 1930s at the invitation of the government's Propaganda Ministry. He wrote numerous articles for far right publications. He started a fascist organization called the Gray Shirts in the United States. He was with the Nazis when they invaded Poland and wrote about how it wasn't as bad as the American press was making it out to be. He was an ardent supporter of the notoriously anti-semitic Father Coughlin. And he was so in the tank for the Nazis that the FBI even suspected him of being a spy.

"You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it," Johnson would tell an interviewer about attending a 1932 Hitler rally in Potsdam, Germany. "...by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd.”

Hilarity did not result in the comments, but it's a good summary of the arguments for keeping these facts in mind as well as setting them aside.

During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centered on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose “failure” seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930s. As a correspondent, Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion proved the breaking point in Johnson’s interest in journalism or politics – he returned to enlist in the US Army.

The subject of Johnson’s past usually leads to a festival of loathing for his architecture, which has many detractors. Johnson committed the sin of being successful and pliable; instead of sticking to one style and marching through life with the steely gaze of the Olympian Genius, descending to the mortal plane every few years to deliver something brilliant and pure, he designed a lot of stuff that strikes some people today as a kitschy or ridiculous. But anyone who remembers skyscraper architecture in the early 80s recalls how dreadful tall buildings had become, and how the addition of new shapes, ornamentation, and historical references made for interesting additions to the American skyline. How much of it was Johnson, and how much of it was the work of his associates, I’ve no idea. I suspect he drew a few things on paper and let the rest of them sort it out. In any case, there’s no particular morality attached to architecture itself, OMD notwithstanding; we associate the architecture of Nazi Germany with evil because of the actions of the people who inhabited the buildings, not the stones themselves.

A murder suspect who has the word "murder" tattooed on his neck is hoping to have the tattoo removed as he fears it will prejudice him in front of a jury.

WEB This Daily Dot piece on “the Reddit Power user who helped bring down r/technology” has a graf that reminds you of things one might want left out of an obituary:

By 2011, Maxwellhill’s diligence paid off. He was proclaimed one of the most viral people of 2011 by Gizmodo and was the first redditor to collect more than one million karma points through Reddit’s gamified voting system, which rewards users for providing the community with popular content and which is completely useless in the real world.

Also on the world of personal accomplishments, from Vice: THIS GUY IS TRYING TO COLLECT EVERY SINGLE CPY OF THE MOVIE ‘SPEED’ ON VHS.”

Ryan Beitz owns over 500 copies of the movie Speed on VHS. He also owns 26 laser discs of the film, but those aren’t part of the collection. He just holds onto them so he can use them as bargaining chips to get more on VHS. His goal is a simple one: To collect every copy of Speed on VHS ever made. His other goal? To trick out his 15-passenger van to look just like the bus in the movie.

So you’d say the World Speed Project is awesome?

I think the World Speed Project is awesome in the truest sense of the word. It's larger than life. Imagine all of them in one place! It’s uncompromising.

Yeah, it’s like a radical dedication to uselessness.

Totally. I don’t give a (bleep) whether what I do is practical or not; I just don’t want to perpetuate society’s (bleepy) capitalism forever. If you see everything needs a use or an instrumental value as like part of a capitalistic worldview, then the World Speed Project is anti-that.

Now go out there and not see things as needing an instrumental value. But only after you watch this:

VotD Your Russian dashcam footage of the day gives us a motorist who decides to do something about a drunk driver.

The driver appears to freeze, like some small creature that plays dead to escape predation.

This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.